Promote Your Internet Business Offline!

September 16, 2009 by  
Filed under Marketing

Jason Wolf asked:


Promote Your Internet Business Offline!

Yes you heard me correctly. Promote your internet business offline. Usually you hear how you can take your offline business and bring it online, but I’m going to show you how to do the opposite. Why promote offline? There are a lot of reasons. Increase sales, reach more people, and grow your websites bottom line. Big businesses are marketing offline and you should be too. Your probably on a small marketing budget just like I am. That’s why I’m going to show you how to effectively market your online business offline with minimal cost.

Offline marketing is more expensive than online marketing, but it can be very effective to tie online and offline marketing together. There are a couple of different ways to tie-in offline marketing. What I’m going to cover here is using postcards and/or brochures to increase your sales. I personally use postcards to help promote my website and to sell my products.

Mailing Postcards work great if you have one or two products that you’re promoting. Any more than that and you should be mailing brochures, which I’ll talk about a little later. I like postcards because they are cheap to mail. It costs 23 cents to mail a postcard 1st class. Online marketers will realize that this is a cheap sales lead.

If you have more than one or two products to promote, you will want to use a 2-sided sales sheet or a small catalog. These will cost your 41 cents to mail, plus you’ll need an envelope. Your marketing price will at least double, but it can still be effective. Especially if you’re selling higher priced items.

Where will you get prospects for your mailing? The first place, I suggest you market to, are your existing customers. People who have purchased from you before will more than likely purchase from you again. As long as your selling products they need or want. Example a mail order company can sell mail order programs for their front end products. Then they can mail back end products, like mailing lists, labels, and other items that the customer will need to mail out their program.

After you market to your existing customers and you have a good sales piece working for you. Then is the time to get a mailing list. I recommend you test a mailing list before you do a mass mailing. Order 500 to 1000 names. If you make a profit from your mailing, chances are you have a winner on your hands and it’s time to order 5000 names. Send that mailing out and get ready to process some orders! Don’t stop there. Continue to market on and off line and you’ll have a great marketing mix. One more thing I’d like to mention about mailing lists. Don’t waste your money on cheap mailing lists. It’s Plain and simple. You will not get the results you need. Make sure the names are fresh 30-90 days old. Stay away from companies that offer you free names with your order. Like buy one get 2 free or companies that offer free names if it’s not deliverable. The free names will probably be just as bad as the rest of them.

When you write your direct mail pieces. Make sure you use proven formulas. Get a good book or report on writing direct mail pieces. You can find advertisements in business opportunity magazines that offer programs for free or a few dollars. You can answer a few of those ads. You’ll get some good and bad examples mailed to you. You’ll be able to tell the difference. Pay close attention to the ones that grab your attention. Those are the good ones. The poorly written and the poor copy pieces end up in the trash and probably won’t hold your attention. You’d be surprised at what some people mail.

A mixture of online and offline marketing is a more rounded approach to marketing. Using these two methods for your business can work very effectively.



Online or Offline Marketing?

September 9, 2009 by  
Filed under Home Business

onlineoffline]

armando williams asked:

start making money online

online money making oppurtunity

profit monster

The internet has revolutionized the world just like how the industrial age changed the way people work and co-exist. The world has become a much smaller place where anyone from anywhere around the world that has access to the internet can communicate with each other, anytime.

So how does this affect the way we make money? The difference is like riding a bicycle to work and taking a cab there. Business can now have a global audience compared to how far word of mouth can take you. So let’s compare the differences.

Creating a network Offline Like I mentioned earlier, offline business is how far word of mouth can take you. That can mean through your personal network or through advertising (TV, radio, mass media). But let’s assume you’re a person who doesn’t want to invest so much in advertising through the mass media (it’s quite costly anyway) and want to create your own personal network. And let’s also assume that you want to create a huge business to bring in more money.

Through my networking experience, let me tell you how it’s going to be. You will have your own list (how many depends on how many contacts you still have on you) and the chances that someone is going to even take a second look at what you’re doing would be one out of every 5. I did say just take a second look. If you’re serious in what you’re doing, probably a handful of people would be as excited as you are doing what you’re doing out of every hundred people.

Let’s face it. The network marketing boom has come and gone a long time ago. People have heard of network marketing opportunities, both the good and the bad. But since the industry has been out there for so long, more of the bad has been heard. “It’s a pyramid” “they’ll just keep taking money from you” “it won’t work” “I don’t know many people” “I don’t have time” “I’m not interested”. Do any of them sound vaguely familiar? People out there are fearful of new opportunities especially ones they’ve heard many things about.

Now let’s talk about the calls you have to make and how often you have to make them. Basically, you need to pick up that phone and talk to EVERY SINGLE person on your list in order to get a few people into your organization. Hey don’t expect your family to be joining you in an instant. Fellow network marketers should understand what I’m saying, yes? Calls you make means extra numbers behind the dollar sign on your phone bill, especially if you are going to use your mobile phone.

So what happens when your list runs out? You will either have to get more referrals or you get out there and find more potential network marketers! That means you have to literally talk to strangers whether you like it or not. You can’t tell me that everyone out there would talk to complete strangers anytime and anywhere. I have met several people who absolutely WILL NOT talk to any strangers or make any cold calls. (At this point, I’d like to recommend a book written by Florence Litthauer entitled “Personality Plus”) So I guess network marketing is not for everyone.

Online To create a network online, it would need four VERY IMPORTANT things. A computer, an internet connection, an email account and you. As compared to offline network marketing, internet marketing needs a fraction of your time for commitment with minimal effort. Introducing people to your online business does not mean you have to be physically there all the time. Think about it. If you’re in Singapore and you have a prospect in the US, you would have to forgo your sleep in order to talk to this person. But with the internet by your side, the world can connect anytime, from anywhere.

Now lets talk about the effort you have to put in. But first let me ask you this question. Do you chat with your friends on messenger? Do you check your mail? Do you surf the net from time to time? If the answer is yes then that is how much effort you need to put in! Just as much as you’re doing now or maybe just a bit more. (It IS a business you’re doing by the way) The word is LEVERAGE. With the same amount of effort you put in doing your offline business, you can potentially get a hundred or even a thousand times the number of prospects you can get!

HOWEVER, the numbers game still applies. In an online business, for every 100 clicks that you get to your page, ONE will opt in. And out of 100 opt-ins, ONE will join the business that you’re doing and out of the 100 people who join, 24 will do it as seriously as you (that is if you’re doing it seriously). Don’t expect a huge sum of money to be falling on your lap with whatever business because if that happens, it probably is not a legitimate business.

But don’t forget that with an online business, you are leveraging your time and effort with almost the same amount of results. I was running a traditional offline business for about 8 months and the most I received was a couple of a hundred dollars. With an online business, I received five times the amount of money within a month! And it was all legitimate. I was always looking for ways to earn fast money and I guess I found the best that the internet can offer!

Offline Gold for Online Marketers – How to Sell your Online Marketing Skills

September 1, 2009 by  
Filed under Internet Marketing

Leon asked:

During the new year holidays, I stumbled upon an interesting post written by Andrew Cavanagh in the Warrior Forum. The post is about how to make money by selling your online marketing skills to businesses right in you local city. This post went completely insane with thousands of views almost immediately and all kinds of positive comments.

Andrew who has over 25 years of experience in developing small businesses also written a 50-page report called “Offline Gold For Online Marketers”. and sales. When I saw his new report, I grabbed it immediately not because of its introductory low price ($19.99) but the idea of selling our online marketing skills or services offline.

The idea of offline marketing is consistent with my thinking. Like I mentioned in my website before, most online marketers are glue to their PC all the time but there are a few smart ones who also spend their time doing networking offline. Because these people know that there are gold mines in the offline world. But, the question is… how do you promote and sell your online marketing skills offline?

If you’ve experience in building a small business before, perhaps you know that the average business owner is very busy just trying to keep his business running. He doesn’t have the time to take a long hard objective look at the way he could improve his marketing strategy. But he is also acutely aware that anything that can improve his net profits will help to keep his business more stable and put real cash in his pocket! Most small business owners are well aware that they can always find time for someone who’s genuinely interested in helping them to improve their businesses and they’re willing to pay for it.

Now if you’ve some basic online marketing skills and are willing to walk into a business and just have a casual conversation about how they can improve their sales using the Internet, a good percentage of them will listen. Of course, besides having some basic online marketing skills, you also need to learn how to talk to these business owners and understand their NEEDS. That’s why I find the report “Offline Gold For Online Marketers” so valuable because it outlines step-by-step how to approach small business owners so they want to listen to you and how to sell your services to them.

Here are some tips on where to find those small business owners and how to communicate with them…

I’m sure you’ve heard about Business Networking International (BNI). If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s basically a business and professional networking organization whose purpose is to provide a structured environment for the development and exchange of qualified business referrals. It’s the largest networking organisation of its kind in the world. I’m sure you can find them in your city.

They hold regular meeting for their members and if you know someone there, you can ask him/her to invite to join their meeting (for free). It’s a great avenue for you to get to know other entrepreneurs from different fields. Make sure you bring a lot of business cards if you attend one of their gatherings.

Just get to know people and have a casual conversation with them. My favorite technique to communicate with small business owners is to always remember to ask questions! For example, let’s say he/she asks you first, “what do you do for a living?”. My normal answer for that question is… “I have a home-based Internet business. How about you?”. Always remember to end your answer with a question. You need to get to know about your potential client and a great way to do this is to talk less and listen more (ie. ask more questions).

Ask them if their businesses currently have a website? Most of them don’t. For those who have websites, they have no idea what is online marketing and they have never made any sale from their websites. You must always in a position to gather information and seek the opportunity to talk about your services. Remember not to talk too much about yourself. Focus on your potential client. it’s enough to say that you have a home-based internet business and you also help small business owners to improve their businesses through online marketing. Ask them this question: “Do you think your business will do better if you have a website?”. Then LISTEN!

I hope this article has given you some great ideas on how to sell your online marketing skills offline. Click here to find out more about “Offline Gold For Online Marketers”.

Top 10 Online Business Marketing Mistakes

July 31, 2009 by  
Filed under Marketing

Assassin Marketing asked:


Before starting up any kind of business, one must set up a plan to earn more than we spend and avoid mistakes along the way. Here are a few internet marketing mistakes that you should watch out for and avoid:

1. Making viewers wait.

Don’t regret paying more for a hostile package that could bring you to people fast. If your website is constantly down, your server is slow, your graphics take two minutes load, you can say goodbye to your potential customers.

2. Technical arrogance.

Never assume that everyone has the latest version of a program to view your site. Always have plain HTML and text versions ready for these users who do not have Macromedia’s flash installed. Also, take notes from successful sites. Outsource to a pro for SEO writing, web design, and programming to invest in a good template for your site if you’re not that confident on your technical prowess.

3. Not marketing offline.

Complement online traffic to your site by marketing offline as well, because no one is online all the time.

4. Not remaining timely.

If you want to attract customers, you need to be updated on recent and upcoming events that are relevant to your site. If you’ve got marketing materials on your site about Memorial Day special and it’s June 15th, you’re losing customers.

5. Poor linkages.

Focus on building long-term passive traffic rather than bulk traffic packages or trying traffic gimmicks. However, be very careful with whom you align yourself. Some companies operate co-registration and affiliate programs that violate the CAN-SPAM act and other rules and regulations. Check out any company that offers you anything , especially those who offer you anything that’s quick and easy.

6. Giving users the third degree.

Signing up for newsletters or making purchases should be easy for your customers. Avoid making them go through a number of links or asking too many questions before complete tasks. You loose 10-15 percent of your potential customers for each question you ask them.

7. Not using viral marketing.

Let your customers create ‘buzzwords’ for you through simple ‘forward to a friend’ links or ‘two for one offers’ or offline marketing on t-shirts and other accessories that your customers can wear. Viral marketing or ‘word of mouth’ (in offline marketing lingo) could create an exponential growth of your site’s visibility by spreading from customer to customer and then business to business.

8. Resorting to cheap gimmicks.

Some marketers resort to goofy and even phony campaigns just to gain brand exposure. These could be entertaining and even viral but sometimes those could backfire because they are irrelevant to the customers and sometimes even to your product or service. Provide something that convert to sales and not just to generate shock or surprise. Connect with your buyers in a positive way by providing products and services that are worth talking about. Associate your site with quality rather than gimmicks and you’ll have customers coming back.

9. Not collecting email addresses.

This is not the same as spamming email addresses because unlike spamming, you ask for your customer’s permission to send them your newsletters and other updates to your site. Remember that spamming could cost you because fines could be very heavy when you are found to be in violation of CAN-SPAM laws. By collection email addresses, you maintain your target audience and your potential market.

10. Mistaking Traffic for Results.

Only because a lot of people seem to be clicking on your ad doesn’t mean that they are buying. Remember that some sites actually buy traffic just to maintain top-line business. But if these people aren’t buying, how do you expect to even earn off it? Continuously paying for this traffic can be expensive. On the other hand, just because you have enough traffic, it does not also mean that your income is guaranteed for the next months to come. What you should really focus on is, how much of this traffic actually converts to sales? Everyday is a challenge to offer something that your client really needs, to persuade them that they need what you’re offering and that you are offering the best of what they need. Online customers actually know what they want, so it is up to your to tell them that what they want is what you are offering.



Merging Your Online and Offline Marketing

July 16, 2009 by  
Filed under Printing

Kaye Z. Marks asked:


There’s no reason for you to consider your offline and online marketing completely separate entities.

There are those companies out there who think that to achieve success online you need to use a completely online approach to your marketing and anything else will be counter productive. You’ll also find those who avoid the internet like the plague and think you don’t need to have any part of their business online at any time.

To avoid one or the other is to lose a good potential for additional business. Both approaches target different people, and you are able to gain support from both types of people if you know how to best combine these two forms of separate marketing.

Who says you can’t have ads online that direct people to your physical location? I’ve seen plenty of ads online that are for completely offline businesses. Now, you can still often find a website for them that gives people additional information about the business, but still directs them to the actual store.

This is easily accomplished, especially since it is rather cheap to set up a website that can provide people with extra details about your company.

Offline companies taking advantage of online approaches happens far more often than the online companies doing the same. Instead they try to avoid printing anything for their advertising if they can help it, but the offline forms of marketing are often going to work well with the same people who spend a lot of their shopping time on the web.

Try some greeting card printing that you can use to send people your web address along with a request to give you a chance. The great thing about this is that because an online business is so easy to gain access to, you’ll have a much better chance of gaining a person’s attention, and getting them to immediately log onto your website.

Because of that ability to immediately try out your website, your greeting card printing will be particularly successful, even more so than if you had a normal offline business that people needed to drive to in order to check out.

And this is just one way of taking advantage of offline marketing to boost up your business. Brochures can be just as effective for an online company as they would be for an offline one. If you avoid anything but internet advertising you’re losing access to some very long standing and great styles of marketing.

No company should ever block themselves off from effective styles of marketing no matter what kind of business they use. Take a look at the entire marketing field and decide on what will work best for your company.

You don’t want to fail to capitalize on a great style of marketing simply because you didn’t think it would work with your company.



Integrating Online and Offline Marketing

July 10, 2009 by  
Filed under Internet

Garry Macdonald asked:


It’s not one or the other, it has to be both!

Why integrating online and offline marketing is essential for marketing success . . .

All brand managers unanimously agree that marketing is a must. But while they are constantly trying to overcome media clutter and find innovative advertising devices, they often commit a simple yet serious crime. If print, TVC, radio, OOH belongs to the realm of offline marketing, PPC, social media marketing, blogs, forums and articles form a distinct part of online marketing. What many people fail to realize is that a marriage of online and offline marketing plans is likely to produce far more effective results than either one alone.

This is at the core of the concept of 360 degree marketing that basically prioritizes multiple media marketing over one or two media. In other words, it may be better to put your eggs in many baskets when you are trying to reach out to the maximum number of consumers.

For brick and mortar businesses, the first obvious step to marketing online is to create an online identity in the form of a professionally designed, search engine optimized website. Not only does this help you reach out to far greater virtual visitors than possible with a physical store or office, it also is a more cost effective way to advertise services. Since most offline marketing media entail prohibitively expensive costs, it is best to use as little media space as possible to grab eyeballs and generate basic awareness. The offline advertisement must then contain a link to your website or more specifically, a specially created web landing page, where the audience can get greater details to satisfy the curiosity created by the offline ad.

Another very important aspect of online marketing is to not limit your presence to a website. There are multiple low-cost, pay for results models offered by various sites and affiliate marketers that can help spread the word about your business on the World Wide Web.

Going from offline to online methods is therefore relatively easy and economical. The reverse, however, is much harder making it very difficult for exclusive internet businesses to have a presence in the non-virtual world. This is particularly magnified in the case of pan-continent businesses where it is just not possible to have an offline presence without having targeted geographies. For such businesses, full exploitation of all possible internet marketing methods is a far safer bet.

Another great benefit of online marketing is the ability to evaluate various media comparatively to a very fine detail and then re-plan allocation of funds to the more ROI effective methods. There is a far more ambiguous link between advertising and sales in offline marketing methods.

In conclusion, online marketing is more suited to smaller companies that are starting up or have limited funds. With time though most businesses need to find a way to make their online and offline marketing models work in tandem for maximum benefits.



5 Tips For Using Private Label Rights Content in Offline Marketing

July 3, 2009 by  
Filed under Business

James T. Maxwell asked:


Most people think Private Label Rights (PLR) is only useful in online marketing. That’s absolutely untrue. Great content has just as big an impact offline as it does online. There are many ways you can use PLR content in offline marketing. Read on to learn five powerful tips on how you can use PLR content in offline marketing.

Tip #1 – Use for Client Autoresponders

If you’re doing marketing for offline clients, often times they’ll request autoresponder services. Although setting up the autoresponders is easy, getting the content for the newsletters can be a bit of a hassle.

Not anymore. There are PLR articles for just about any business in the world. Is your client an optometrist? A lawyer? No problem. Whatever business your client is in, chances are you can pay just a little bit for autoresponder content and save a whole lot of time.

Tip #2 – Help Your Clients Generate Traffic

You can also use PLR content to help generate website traffic for your offline clients. It’s easy to take “broad” PLR content and repurpose it to local PLR content.

For example, you can take a PLR article titled “How to Find an Optometrist” and change it to “How to Find an Optometrist in San Francisco”. Take this article and submit it to article directories or put it on your client’s webpage for great search engine traffic.

Tip #3 – Sell it As a Product

Informational products are sold just as much offline as online. People have had a lot of success selling tapes, DVDs and books in offline marketing. Using PLR content, you can easily create a DVD or CD product and sell it using offline marketing.

Tip #4 – Use it for Lead Generation

Content giveaway is a great way to generate leads. Just like how on the internet marketers love to give away information in exchange for emails, in offline marketing you can do exactly the same thing.

You can write a complete ad and at the end “sell” them on getting more information on a free DVD. That free DVD can simply be PLR content. If you want to reduce your costs, you can even offer the PLR content on a website instead of something that you’ll mail.

Tip #5 – Use PLR Content to Build Credibility

One great way to build credibility is to be an offline publisher. One well known tactic in the marketing world is to “write a column” that is actually paid for Ad space.

For example, let’s say you’re a car salesman who wants to generate more business. Every week, you buy a column of ad space and teach people how to get a good deal on cars. You soon develop your name in the business and get a steady stream of referrals. Instead of having to write all that content yourself, you can simply use great PLR content and republish it under your own name.

Be Creative

As you can tell, there are many, many ways you can use PLR content offline. The sky is the limit. Be creative and use your imagination. Keep good marketing principles in mind and you can make a lot of money by using PLR content offline.



Marketing Offline. Marketing Online

June 3, 2009 by  
Filed under Internet Marketing

marketing

Ihab asked:

The great thing about search engine marketing is its ability to attract a consumer who has already expressed interest in a service or product via a search engine term. The consumer’s curiosity is already whetted. It is up to the e-marketer to satisfy this curiosity.

Offline marketing campaigns set the preliminary grounds by exposing the consumer to its product or service through the print media, the television, the radio and billboards. These offline campaigns affect about 70 percent of your overall audience. The remaining 30 percent is that part of the market that can be reached effectively through online marketing.

Thus, in a way, your advertising strategies have to effectively cover offline as well as online marketing. Only by integrating your online campaigns with the offline ones can you expect your brand to have better recognition. The more aware your target market is about your product, the better chances you have of establishing their trust in your brand.

Today, building a stable relationship with your audience is made easier with online marketing methods like podcasts, search engines, social interaction platforms, corporate blogs, mobile e-mail alerts, company websites, etc. to name a few. This YouTube era prefers a more personalized approach and outlook to any virtual communication.

Formality is a passé word for this generation of consumers, though they prefer to be approached with a degree of professionalism. After all, if a seller has to stand out from, the multitude of competitors that are present online, he has to have the right mix of trust, user appeal and a professional approach to conducting business.

At Clear Media Online, our e-marketing professionals work with you to understand your advertising requirements. We are proficient in understanding your offline campaigns and work accordingly to integrate them with our online marketing methods.

Developing A Unique Selling Proposition: Consistency Between Online And Offline Marketing

June 2, 2009 by  
Filed under Communication

BizAtomic asked:


This month’s articles hammer home the importance of synergy and consistency between your online and offline marketing efforts. Within this context this month tip addresses what may well be the most important and overriding marketing consideration you can make, online or offline—- Developing your Unique Selling Proposition (USP).

When companies are trying to determine how to market a product, they focus on the Unique Selling Proposition, the one thing that makes that product different than any other. It’s the one reason they think consumers will buy the product even though it may seem no different from many others just like it. It may be that the product has a lower price or more convenient packaging, or it may taste or smell better, or last longer. Would you buy from a company that does not promise some great value, benefit, or service but just a “buy from us” for no good reason sales pitch?

Your unique selling proposition is the mantra around which you will build your success so you need to be able to state it in a single statement. It will discipline you to focus on what your business is all about and bring your company to mind when someone is looking for the products or services you sell. It answers the question every consumer asks “What’s in it for me”?

Many businesses online and offline don’t provide an answer – and very few online businesses make sure that answer appears on their landing and home pages. If you can’t cut through the clutter, grab attention and communicate immediately that you offer value nobody else has, your visitors are gone to someone who can.

In order to create your USP ask yourself the following questions:

1. What are the unique aspects about my business, product, or service vs my competition?

2. Which of these aspects are most important to my customers?

3. Which aspects are difficult for my competition to imitate?

4. Which of these aspects can be easily communicated and understood?

5. Can you create a memorable message (USP) of these unique, meaningful qualities about your business or brand?

6. How will you communicate this message (USP) to buyers and end users, both online and offline?

Examples:

AVIS: “We Try Harder”

Burger King: “Have it your Way”

Kentucy Fried Chicken: “Finger Lickin Good”

Dominos Pizza: “Fresh, hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed”



How To Explode Your Online Profits With Offline Marketing

June 1, 2009 by  
Filed under Internet Marketing

POMCOVERLARGECM

Allie James asked:

Online marketing is rapidly becoming one of the most popular business opportunities in the world. One of the things that most online marketer fail to realize is that even though your main focus is and should be the internet one could make a killing marketing offline. I honestly do not know why offline marketing has become a lost art but if you are serious about maximizing your true earning potential you may want to consider this still very profitable method of marketing.

Here are a few ways that you can do this:

1. Get some business cards made. No matter what you are promoting online you should have a business card. It doesn’t have to have your name and phone number on it. You can simply have a short message on it and your web address on it. You should always keep these on you because you never know when they may come in handy.

2. Use flyers. I know this seem completely old school but flyers can still be very effective. It’s all about where you put them. The first thing you need to do is make sure that you create a simple but enticing flyer that will get the attention of people. After you have your flyers all ready to get you need to think about what you are offering and where would potential buyers be.

For example: If you are marketing something to do with baseball you probably would want to go to baseball games where you will be able to leave flyers on cars chairs and even the bathroom. You don’t have to even being noticed doing this. You can distribute your flyers without bringing any attention to yourself. On the other hand if you are more of the “hey look at me” type of person you can literally pass your flyers out to people coming in or out of the game.

3. Run ads in mini merchants and newspapers. I am pretty sure that whatever you are promoting online can be promoted effectively in your local newspaper or a mini merchant or any type of offline publication that allows ads. Once again, you need to make sure your ad is catchy. Always write ads with the thought of “what would make someone go to my site”.

These are just a few simple ways that you can really increase your online sales. No one really promotes offline anymore and this is exactly why you should. I really do hope that you implement these very effective tactics to grow your online business.

Allie is a member of one of the most respected money making clubs in the world, which has taught her how to make a full time income online. If you are serious about wanting to make a six-figure income online you can join this very exclusive club by going to http://kingmaverickmoneymakers.com.

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